Privacy Policy

This policy explains how DharmKriya (dharmkriya.com) handles your information across our website and our mobile app. DharmKriya is an independent community platform for Hindu devotional activity: pandal tracking, puja booking requests, festival information, and related tools. It applies whenever you use the app or site. If you have a question about anything below, or you want to reach the people responsible for your data, write to namaste@dharmkriya.com and it reaches the team directly.

To sign in you give us a mobile phone number, and we send a one-time password (OTP) to it to confirm the number is yours. We use the number to create and secure your account, to send you the OTP, and to reach you about a booking or request you have made. Verifying the OTP is delivered through a third-party SMS or WhatsApp messaging provider that sends the code on our behalf. We do not use your number for unrelated marketing, and we do not sell it.

Your name, email address, date of birth, and profile photo are all optional. You add them only if you want to personalise the experience, for example a birth date to generate a kundli or a daily rashifal, or a photo to show on your profile. In the mobile app this profile is stored on your own device to personalise the app, and is not required for it to work. Where you deliberately use a feature that needs one of these details on our server, for example submitting a booking request under your name and contact, that specific detail is sent to us to fulfil what you asked for, and nothing more.

We use your city and an approximate location to show you the pandals, pujas, and festival information nearest to you, and to place a pandal listing or sighting on the map at roughly the right spot (geocoding). You can set your city yourself. If you choose to share device location for a feature such as finding pandals around you or tagging where a photo was taken, that is used for that feature at the time. We do not need, and do not ask for, continuous or background location, and we do not build a movement history of you.

DharmKriya is partly built from what the community shares: photos of pandals, sightings, open or closed status, crowd levels, and timings. When you submit any of this, it is stored on our servers so it can be shown to other devotees, and it may appear publicly on the platform along with the approximate location it relates to. Please do not upload photos that clearly identify other individuals without their consent. You can ask us to take down something you contributed by writing to namaste@dharmkriya.com.

If you opt in, we send reminders and updates over WhatsApp, for example a festival or muhurta reminder, a rashifal, or an update about a booking. This is opt-in: we send these only after you have asked for them, the messages go through WhatsApp (Meta) as the delivery channel under their own terms, and every such message lets you stop them. You can withdraw the opt-in at any time from within the app or by replying to stop, and it does not affect the rest of your account.

During the festival we run WhatsApp groups and communities where devotees share what they are seeing: which pandal they are at, how long the queue is, whether bhog or anjali is on, and photos of the pandal. A DharmKriya bot reads the messages posted in those groups so that information can reach the live map and the pandal pages, which is how the map stays current when nobody has time to fill in a form. Every group where this runs says so in its description and in a pinned message, and the bot is named there. What reaches the website is the information about the pandal, never the information about you. We publish the pandal or area a message is about, an approximate location, crowd or queue level, timings, and any pandal photo shared. We do not publish your name, your display name, your phone number, the name of the group, or your message reproduced word for word. Locations are shown as an approximate area rather than an exact point, and a place is only shown once enough separate reports agree, so a single message can never put a pin on the map. We do not keep your phone number from a group at all. The account a message came from is stored only as a one-way code, which lets our moderators see that several messages came from the same person, so repeated abuse can be dealt with, but cannot be turned back into a number and cannot be used to contact you. For a limited period we also keep the display name you use on WhatsApp and the name of the group, so a moderator can check a report. Those are never shown on the website, and they are deleted after ninety days. Ninety days is chosen so that a complaint made after the festival still has something to investigate, and it is not longer than that because data nobody is using is only a risk. Numbers you give us yourself are different, and are covered in the sections above: when you sign in, or opt into reminders such as the daily rashifal, you are handing us a number for a purpose you chose, and we hold it to do that. What we will not do is take a number out of a group and add it to that list. If you would rather nothing you post is used this way, leave the group, or write to namaste@dharmkriya.com and we will remove what came from you. You can ask for that at any time and you do not have to give a reason. If you are not comfortable with a bot reading a group, please do not join it: everything the platform offers is available on the website and the app without it.

We try to keep as much as possible on your own device. In the mobile app, your optional profile (name, email, date of birth, photo) and your preferences (city, language, theme, saved pandals) are held on the device to personalise the app. Information reaches our servers only when a feature genuinely needs it: your phone number and account record, a booking or request you submit, content you contribute to the community, and technical logs described below. If you reinstall the app or clear its data, on-device information is cleared with it.

Like any online service we record limited technical information to keep the platform working and safe: for example a hashed or truncated IP address, device and app-version details, and basic error and usage logs. This is used for security, abuse prevention, debugging, and understanding which features are used, in aggregate. We do not use it to build an advertising profile of you.

We do not sell your personal data. We share the minimum necessary with service providers who run parts of the platform for us, and only so they can perform that job: cloud hosting and database providers who store the data securely on our behalf, an SMS or WhatsApp (Meta) provider that delivers your OTP and any reminders you opted into, and map and geocoding providers that turn a place into map coordinates so listings appear in the right location. Where you make a paid booking, payment is handled by a PCI-DSS compliant payment gateway and we do not store your full card or UPI credentials. These providers act on our instructions and under their own privacy terms.

We keep your account information for as long as your account is active, and information tied to a booking or request for as long as we need it to provide that service and to meet any legal, tax, or accounting obligation. Community contributions such as photos and sightings may remain on the platform after you post them so the listings stay useful, though you can ask us to remove specific items. Technical logs are kept only for a limited period for security and debugging. When you delete your account, we delete or anonymise your personal data as described below. What we take from WhatsApp groups (see the section on WhatsApp groups and the live pandal map) is deleted after ninety days: the display name and group name we hold for moderation, and the one-way code that stands in for the account, all go at that point.

You can access, correct, or update your profile details from within the app or by asking us. You can withdraw an opt-in, such as WhatsApp reminders, at any time. You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by writing to namaste@dharmkriya.com. We will respond within a reasonable time. If you are in a place with specific data-protection rights, we honour those rights as the applicable law requires.

You are in control of your account. In the mobile app you can delete your account and its data yourself from More, then Delete account. You can also delete your account and data by writing to namaste@dharmkriya.com from, or referencing, the phone number on the account, and we will action it. Deleting your account removes your profile and account record and disconnects your contributions from your identity; some records we are legally required to retain, such as invoices for a completed paid booking, are kept only as long as the law requires and then deleted.

DharmKriya is intended for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under the age required by local law to consent to online services. If you believe a child has provided us personal data, write to namaste@dharmkriya.com and we will delete it.

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including encryption in transit, access controls, and storing data with reputable hosting providers. No method of transmission or storage is ever completely secure, so we cannot promise absolute security, but we work to protect your data and to respond quickly if something goes wrong.

We may update this policy as the product changes or the law requires. When we make a material change we will update the date shown on this page, and where appropriate tell you in the app or by a message. Continuing to use DharmKriya after an update means the updated policy applies to you.

For any question about this policy, about the data we hold, or to exercise any of your rights, write to us at namaste@dharmkriya.com. This mailbox reaches the DharmKriya team that is responsible for your data, and is the contact point for privacy requests including access and deletion.